Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey[134] did; I
believe that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the
Amazons are now engirdling our English universities, I find that here in
America, in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar
College in the State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed
universities out West, they are studying it already.
_Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca_,--"The antique symmetry was the one
thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I
will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the
Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a
thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results of
the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our architecture,
but they show themselves, also, in all our art. _Fit details strictly
combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived_; that is
just the beautiful _symmetria prisca_ of the Greeks, and it is just
where we English fail, where all our art fails.
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